King of Saudi Arabia Fahd Biography

Born c. 1923, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; died after a long illness, August
1, 2005, in Riyadh. King. Saudi Arabia's King Fahd Bin Abdul Aziz
Al Saud ruled over a once-barren desert kingdom whose oil riches made it
one of the world's wealthiest nations. The once-errant playboy
courted alliances with the West as well as other Arab nations, which
placed his tightly controlled realm in an ideological buffer zone between
the Muslim world and secular democracies. Under Fahd, however, Saudi
society remained authoritarian and dominated by strict Islamic-law codes.

Fahd is believed to have been born in 1923, at a time when Saudi Arabia
did not yet exist as a nation. The Saud royal family had emerged as a
political dynasty in the 1740s in the central Arabian peninsula by forging
alliances with clerics of a conservative Islamic sect known as Wahhabism.
Fahd's father, Amir Abdul Aziz, led a series of military excursions
that enlarged the Saud family holdings, and in 1925 his forces captured
Islam's holy city, Mecca. The following year, Aziz was proclaimed
king in the Mecca's Grand Mosque. Until oil was discovered in 1938,
the Saudi kingdom was a poor, sparsely populated land. Its main source of
revenue came from the thousands of Muslim men who made the
hajj,
or pilgrimage to Mecca, that the religion's creed deems they must
do once in their lifetime.

Among Aziz's 36 sons by his 22 wives, Fahd was part of a line known
as the Sudairi Seven. These were the full-blood brothers whose alliance
would become the most powerful one within the Saud ruling clan. At the
Princes' School in Riyadh—the Saud family seat and Saudi
capital—Fahd received a rudimentary education which included
learning to read the Koran and a familiarity with shari'a, or
Islamic law. His first official post came when his father made him
governor of Jauf, a province in the north, in the mid-1940s.

Fahd became minister for education in 1953, the same year that Aziz died
and was succeeded on the throne by the oldest of Aziz's sons, Saud.
The new post was one of tremendous responsibility, because it came at a
time when the country's oil riches were beginning to fund a major
modernization effort, but hardline clerics objected to secular education.
Despite the objections, Fahd managed to establish a network of schools and
even separate ones for girls. Along the way, he reportedly enhanced his
own limited education with the help of private tutors. After 1962 he
served as minister of the interior under his brother, King Faisal, who had
succeeded Saud to the throne.

In March of 1975, Faisal was assassinated by a nephew, and Fahd's
half-brother Khalid became king. Three months later, Fahd was designated
crown prince, or next in the line of succession. He began to exert
influence on Saudi Arabia's domestic and foreign policy, meeting
with world leaders such as U.S. president Jimmy Carter, and ascended to
the throne on June 13, 1982, after Khalid's death.

Fahd spent the next dozen years of his reign engaged in delicate balancing
acts on several fronts. There was a division between the country's
still-powerful
clerics and a growing middle class, who clamored for some semblance of
democratic government. Fahd made some concessions to the powerful clerics,
most notably in the continuance of Saudi Arabia's strict religious
codes and restrictions on women. Outside the kingdom, Saudi Arabia was the
world's largest oil exporter and, as such, was courted by a
succession of U.S. presidents and secretaries of state. American support
for Israel, however, made many Arabs uneasy with befriending the Jewish
state's most important ally. Fahd tried to placate both sides by
donating generously to the Palestinian cause, while also buying millions
of dollars worth of high-tech weaponry from the United States. The
presence of U.S. military bases in the kingdom was troubling to some
devout Saudis, who lived in a land long hostile to outsiders and
intolerant of any creed save for Wahhabism.

During the first Gulf War, U.S. forces mobilized for the attack on
Iraqi-occupied Kuwait at those bases inside Saudi Arabia, which offended
devout Muslims worldwide. One who resented the aid given to a foreign,
largely Christian army for its attack on a Muslim nation was a Saudi
exile, Osama bin Laden, whose fundamentalist organization would eventually
launch deadly terrorist attacks around the world, including ones on Saudi
soil.

A heavyset man who had been known for his fast-living lifestyle in the
capitals of Europe during his younger years, Fahd suffered from diabetes
and his health declined considerably following a 1995 stroke. A
half-brother, Abdullah, took over an increasing number of executive duties
as Crown Prince. Fahd was hospitalized in May of 2005 for pneumonia, and
died in Riyadh on August 1, at an age estimated between 82 and 84 years
old. He had eight sons by three wives, and all wives and seven of the sons
survive him. The kingdom he ruled, officially, for 23 years had witnessed
unprecedented changes since his boyhood, but Fahd was mindful of the
reasons behind its rise as a world power. In a telephone conversation
secretly taped by Iraqi intelligence services, he told an official of the
Qatar government that "when we were poor, when we rode donkeys and
had difficulty finding a few dates to eat, no one asked about us,"
he said, according to his London
Times
obituary. "They only acknowledge us now because we have
money."
Sources:
Chicago Tribune,
August 2, 2005, sec. 1, p. 2;
Los Angeles Times,
August 2, 2005, p. A1, p. A8;
New York Times,
August 2, 2005, p. C16;
Times
(London), August 2, 2005, p. 41;
Washington Post,
August 2, 2005, p. A1, p. A10.

—
Carol
Brennan

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